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I believe the language they used among themselves was Albanian.
    “Another three dives,” Laszlo said, “maybe four. The first to clear the wire away and get started on moving the mast. The second to finish with the mast, then another to open the hatch. If cargo’s shifted on top of your box, we might need another dive to clear that away. But we should be finished tomorrow.”
    Dr. Pan gave a smooth smile and said that was good, then lit one of his little cigars. Dr. Chun didn’t look any less anxious than he had at the start of the meeting.
    That night our shows went off as per normal, if you consider scoping the audience for potential assassins to be normal, which for us it all too often was. We’d been over the passenger manifest, and the only last- minute additions had been Dr. Pan and his party, so I thought we were reasonably safe.
    When we awakened next morning we were anchored off Hong Kong Island, and I joined the water ballet guys in their launch with a box of dim sum I’d nicked from the kitchens. To my disappointment, I found that the mermaids were not going along.
    “It’s so unprofessional, ” Laszlo complained. “They think someone’s going to come along and rip their throats out.”
    “You could offer them hazardous duty pay,” I suggested hopefully.
    “But it’s not hazardous!” he said. “Diving to seven atmospheres breathing exotic gasses is hazardous — but do I hold you up for extra money?”
    I shrugged— he’d tried, after all— and resigned myself to a heavy lunch of dim sum.
    In short order we were bobbing in the swell over the wreck, and Laszlo and one of the guys went down on the first dive of the day. As the dive plan called for Laszlo to stay under the water for over two hours, I was surprised to see him break the surface ninety minutes early.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked as I helped him over the gunwale.
    His face was grim. “You’ve got to go down and look at it yourself.”
    “What is it? Did Perugachi get the cargo?”
    “Maybe the cargo got him, ” he said, and he turned to one of the Apollos. “Sztephen,“ he said, “take Ernesto down to the wreck, show him around, and make sure he doesn’t die.”
    Sztephen gave me a dubious look while he struck a pose that emphasized his triceps development. I gave him what was meant to be a reassuring grin and reached for my wet suit
    Because I’d been so thoroughly narked on my last trip, Laszlo insisted that I make this one on Trimix, which involved two extra-heavy cylinders on my back and a mixture that was fifty percent helium, fifteen percent oxygen, and the rest nitrogen. We also carried stage cylinders on our chests, for use in decompression, which we were to rig to our descent line as we went down.
    It was all unfamiliar enough to have my nerves in a jangle by the time I splashed into the briney lamenting the fact that while I breathed Trimix instead of air the consolations of nitrogen narcosis were beyond my reach. Still, the descent went well enough, and the great stillness and silence and darkness helped to calm my throbbing heart.
    Which was a pity, because my heart slammed into overdrive again once I saw Goldfish Fairy. The wreck lay with a black cavern just behind the bows, where the covers to the fore hatch had been thrown off.
    Much of the cargo had also been lifted from the hold and thrown over the side, where it lay in piles. Such of the cargo as I saw seemed to consist of T-shirts with the Pokari Sweat logo on them.
    But Pokari Sweat was not long in my thoughts, because I observed something pale and geometric protruding from the after hatch, and when I kicked toward the object, I discovered that it was a brilliant white pyramid.
    No, I corrected on further inspection, not a pyramid— a tetrahedron, a four-sided figure with each side making an equilateral triangle. It had broken out of the hatch, and its colorless tip had shoved aside the mast and was reaching for the surface, sixty meters above. The